A core stylized fact of the empirical exchange rate literature is that half-life deviationsof equilibrium real exchange rates from levels implied by Purchasing Power Parity(PPP) are very persistent. Empirical efforts to explain this persistence typicallyproceed along two distinct paths,...

We provide the first cross-country evidence of the effect of investment by privateequity firms on innovation, focusing on a sample of European countries and usingKortum and Lerner’s (2000) empirical methodology. Using an 18-country panelcovering the period 1991-2004, we study how private...

We assess the fiscal behaviour in the European Union countries for the period 1990-2005 via the responsiveness of budget balances to several determinants. The resultsshow that the existence of effective fiscal rules, the degree of public spendingdecentralization, and the electoral cycle can...

We reappraise the relationship between productivity and equilibrium real exchangerates using a panel estimation framework that incorporates a large number ofcountries and importantly, a dataset that allows explicit consideration of the role ofnon-traded, as well as traded, sector productivity...

The private investment response to structural reforms in developing countries is of paramount importance, both for the future economic growth and the survival of the reforms themselves. By employing a sample of countries, recipients of World Bank Structural Adjustment Loans, the present paper...

In this paper, we perform an extensive Monte Carlo study of the finite sample properties of different estimators for panel data sample selection models. The estimators investigated are various two-step estimators and maximum likelihood estimators with simultaneous equations for the...

The recent literature on the aid-growth relation discusses two competing models: The Good Policy Model, where the key feature is policy times aid, and the Medicine Model, where the key feature is aid squared. Both have been reached on a sample of about 1/3 of the available data. We present a...

This paper considers estimation of a dynamic discrete choice model with second order state dependence in the presence of strictly exogenous time-varying explanatory variables. We propose new method for estimating such models, and a small Monte Carlo study suggests that the method erforms well in...

Low birthweight outcomes are associated with large social and economic costs, and therefore the possible determinants of low birthweight are of great interest. One such determinant which has received considerable attention is maternal smoking. From an economic perspective this is in part due to...

We propose a new estimator, the thresholded scaled Lasso, in high dimensional threshold regressions. First, we establish an upper bound on the sup-norm estimation error of the scaled Lasso estimator of Lee et al. (2012). This is a non-trivial task as the literature on highdimensional models has...